Sharing detailed personal health information in a public forum isn’t smart. Sure the tongue-in-cheek comment about your ingrown toenail isn’t likely to create problems. Discussions about anything more serious isn’t for others to hear. Keep in mind that everyone from employers to insurance companies are tuning in to what you have to say.
Hmmm.
Having problems getting past that first sentence and the general fear factor approach.
"Hope is an important part of happiness. But there's a dark side to hope," a co-author of the study, Dr. Peter A. Ubel, said in a news release. "We think [the permanent colostomy patients] were happier because they got on with their lives. They realized the cards they were dealt, and recognized that they had no choice but to play with those cards. The other group was waiting for their colostomy to be reversed. They contrasted their current life with the life they hoped to lead, and didn't make the best of their current situation."
There's a lesson here for healthcare professionals, too, the authors wrote. Healthcare professionals want to give their patients hope and may be reluctant to correct false hopes. But patients may be better off facing the truth.
"While hopeful news may be easiest to deliver, it may not at all be in the interests of the recipients because it may interfere with emotional adaptation," the authors wrote.
From: "Sometimes patients shouldn't hold on to hope | Booster Shots | Los Angeles Times."
Whose job is it to 'correct' false hopes?
If someone had 'corrected' my unrealistic (clinically speaking) hope that I'd keep my right leg, if someone had 'corrected' my unrealistic (clinically speaking) hope that someday I'd run again (multiple 5ks and a Sprint Tri later), if someone had 'corrected' my unrealistic (clinically speaking) hope that I'd be able to wear a 1.75 inch heeled shoe, would that mean they were just helping me "play the cards" I'd been dealt?
Whose job is it to 'correct' my emotional adaptations to 'reality?'
If anyone succeeded in doing that, I wouldn't be here, in Silicon Valley, starting a health tech company, with no previous tech experience.
Facing my medical truths was about *not* abandoning hope. In fact, it was facing my medical truths that led me to move to San Francisco and begin to build things that help other people who are patients NOT abandon hope.
People want to know what to do, yes. People want to know what to worry about, yes. People want to know what to expect (good/bad), yes.
But sometimes holding on to hope is the only thing that keeps us holding *on* to our lives, much less "getting on" with them.
The day our healthcare system advocates killing hope is the day we have truly buried a system that operates "in the interests of the recipients."
You know what I hope? I hope I don't live to see that day realized.
| Chinese Proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie @ Blackberry Dev Con: "We've been beavering away on a lot of things these last couple of years," said RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie during his opening keynote Monday morning. "This is not about thousands of islands of applications. It's about deep, rich integration to enable transformative experiences. Our view is that we have an environment with tremendous possibilities for contextualization." From "Gmail - | 11.10.09 | New browser, platform enhancements juice up BlackBerry - contagionhealth@gmail.com. Which mobile/handset strategy will win? The one creating a singular 'deep' platform (RIM) that developers must adhere to in order to create those mind-blowing contextually relevant experiences, or the one that throws wide the gates (Apple) and lets merchants (and prospective merchants) themselves plan the layout of the bazaar? Seems to me you always win by going with the exponential power of teaching man (or woman) to fish for themselves... Jen S. McCabe @jensmccabeCEO/Founder: Contagion Health CoFounder: NextHealth (NL)LinkedIn: Jen McCabe Skype: jenmccabeiPhone: 301.904.5136 Dutch Mobile: +31655585351jennifermccabegorman@yahoo.com |
In some very energetic people's lives you see something like wing flutter, where they alternate between doing great work and doing absolutely nothing. Externally this would look a lot like bipolar disorder.
Paul Graham may be a genius. Lisa Haneberg is the first person who told me to 'flap my wings' at a SIPA meeting, my first time visiting Silicon Valley, in 2006.
How right she was about being aflutter...
Related to the difficulties of delivering on time and on budget are other promises that should never be taken at face value:
"We want you to be a change agent and shake things up."
Bosses and boards often espouse change as a desirable goal but less often embrace its implications — e.g., firing old hands, closing or selling historically-core assets, or challenging organizational assumptions. Officials generally like things stirred but not shaken (unlike James Bond's martini). So if you are told that you've been hired or assigned to shake things up in the interests of change, don't believe it — even if it's clear that a turnaround is necessary.
This promise tastes dust the minute controversy surfaces. Controversy is embarrassing, time-consuming, and takes eyes off the situation needing change and onto the personality of the change agent.
From: "Promises You Should Never Believe (or Make) - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org."
Before you try to 'shake things up,' always consider, deeply, realistically, your motivations for doing so.
Maybe the only change agents who actually change things leave organizations where they've found 'stirring' ineffective and start their own gig?
Open to commentology...
If you still think YouTube is just for those durned kids, you're really missing out. We at FierceHealthcare have decided to present seven of our favorite healthcare videos, with topics ranging from the serious (a critique of U.S. public health efforts in controlling H1N1) to the purely silly (an anesthesiologist singing about his duty to "sit and listen to the beep.")
For their creativity, educational value and pure passion, we hereby deem these videos Fierce! Have fun checking them out; we certainly did.
H1N1 Influenza Update Briefing
From: "7 YouTube Healthcare Videos Worth Watching - FierceHealthcare."
PS - Chad Hurley, sorry again for not recognizing you right off at TEDMED. All the jumping around must have jostled my brain pan...
Conventional expression of the Central Dogma of Molecule Biology:
(DNA ==>2X DNA) ==> RNA ==> Protein ==> Phenotype
Read the article, and look up Shapiro's paper, especially if you're interested in genomics, RNA World theory, genoanth.
